Changing from one work PC to another (well its a Mac book Pro, 4 GB RAM, SSD disk… but who cares:-) is not fun. Having 3 years of work related stuff with settings, preferences, bookmarks, local pop server, SQL server, workflows, community etc. is a lot to manage. Moving all of this is not an easy task as the reason why you are changing machine is bad performance and you don’t want bad performance on the new machine.
Changing to a new computer is like moving to a new apartment. The things that fitted (or had its place) in the old apartment don’t fit (or you don’t want in the new). MS Outlook was one such thing that I had but didn’t seem to fit on the new computer. Basically what I used Outlook for was mail, calendar and contacts (PIM). One of the key factors for me is to have my PIM available on my phone, so syncing my iPhone with Outlook through iTunes was the setup I had on my old computer. Another thing that bothered me was the fact that Outlook seemed to consume a lot of power just by running.
The solution I have come up with is almost too good to be true (and then it probably is???).
Setup on my new Mac 1
My company has a Google Apps account (you can use regual Gmail and Calendar as well). All my mail and my contacts from Outlook were uploaded with Google Email Uploader. The process took about 12 hours but that included 12 000 e-mails with attachments. In Gmail the folder structure from Outlook was treated as tags which is kind of new but Gmail has Google search :-D During the upload process I kept wondering about disk space and whether I had to limit the number of e-mails put into Gmail. However when the process ended Gmail reported that “You are currently using 816MB (11%) of your 7311MB” - no need to worry.
With e-mails and contacts taken care of I only had my calendar left in order to take the leap from Outlook. The process was simple as Outlook can export calendar items to *.cvs and Google Apps can import it.
However working in a web environment isn’t my thing when it comes to mail and calendar so I had to get a mail client. I had heard a lot of good being said about Thunderbird so I installed it and hooked it up using IMAP to my Google Apps account. In Thunderbird the tags from Gmail was shown as folder structure which caught me by surprise - obviously a good one though. For calendar I installed Lightning which has an inbuilt connection for Google Calendar. As for contacts I installed Zindus which sync contacts from Google Apps to Thunderbird and vice-versa. All of a sudden I sat there with a fully functional solution for handling my PIM – great – goal 1 achieved.
Setup on my new Mac 2 – the part I love the most
So fare so good, but there was still one thing missing – how to get all of this into my phone? Synchronizing contacts and calendar has always been tricky and I have used many of the solutions out there (my first attempt was to sync my Palm Pilot via Intellisync 10 years ago). Later when windows mobile came I used Active sync and when I got an iPhone I used iTunes. But all of these solutions has one thing in common – they all need a cable from the device to the computer (if you don’t set up to use Bluetooth which never works…).
My solution came as an Epiphany (which is kind of suitable as we entered Easter). As I searched the web for a solution I came across Google Sync. Google Sync can sync with most of the popular devices out there and is a direct competitor to MobileMe from Apple (except from the files and pictures) but Google sync is free! The process of setting up Google Sync is straight forward and I crossed my fingers as I hit the save button – was it going to work?
So… did it…? I guess it’s no surprise to you that the answer is “of course…” I could write paragraph after paragraph about how well it works and still it wouldn’t make up for the admiration I have for the people who came up with the solution (and it would have looked a lot like how Apple describes MobileMe). But the best way for you to understand how well it works is to try it out today – or at least consider it next time you are moving (changing computer).
I might come off as a Google groupie (and I kind of am) but you can’t argue that Google has a lot of cool applications and solutions and they just work!
For Christmas I was given 2 tickets from my wife to the Metallica concert last week (17th of June) - one for me and one for her (after all, taking into account that the tickets sold out in less than 15 minutes the effort put into getting tickets reserved a reward:-)
